5 TWEAKS that improve Linux Mint!

welcome back so today what I want to do is I want to walk through a couple of the tweaks and some of my favorite things that I've found tweaking the Linux Mint desktop over the last year or so if you subscribed to the channel and even if you're not some of you may have seen this video that I published recently about why Linux Mint is probably the best Linux distribution for the average desktop user and over the last year or so I've discovered some things that have really made this work for me personally maybe these will be helpful for you so without further Ado let's get into it [Music] Linux Mint already by default looks fairly decent um but there are a few small things that I've done to tweak the desktop to my liking and I want to do this by way of recommending a few extensions in the cinnamon desktop I want to talk about uh a couple of uh tweaks that I make in terms of layout and appearance I want to talk about a couple of apps that I've come across that Smooths the experience out a little bit as well and uh and let me know in the comments what suggestions you have for getting the most out of your cinamon desktop so number one fonts uh when it comes to fonts the default Linux Mint font is the auntu font uh now for me personally I don't mind the auntu font but I really got used to seeing the inter font so you can see here these are the fonts that I use I'm basically just using a 10-point inter font but I've cranked up the scaling to 1.2 and I've also made sure that the um font hinting is on Full and not on slight as it is by default um mileage is going to vary here but it is worth mentioning that inter the font doesn't come as standard install with Linux Mint so you do have to go into the software manager and uh and look up the inter uh fonts the good thing is that it is in the repositories so it is a very uh easy oneclick uh install from the software Center and then you can roll it out here um for your desktop now for me I I guess I'm getting old and I sit away from the monitor a bit I've got a 15-in laptop display so at 1080p resolution it's beneficial for me to crank that uh font um scaling up a little bit and to me this actually satisfies the need of uh of scaling in general uh although cinnamon does have scaling uh it's not as dialed in as gnome and KDE but you can achieve mostly the same effect by a cranking up the scaling of the fonts and B increasing the size of the icons in the taskbar which is my next tweak so in order to achieve this particular panel you right click on the panel go to panel settings and then customize the panel height now for me I've gone up to 48 uh because that's kind of the next click where the icons kind of clear up a bit what you're going to notice is if you have an irregular panel size height you'll end up with a panel that's tall but icons that are really small whereas if you scale it up to 48 then the uh then the icons jump up a size once we're at 48 I feel like this is more easy to see and uh there's a little more spacing between the icons and it feels uh a little less claustrophobic um but you can also then customize the size of these little guys over in the system tray using the left Center and right Zone uh symbolic icon size and again you can scale those up or down depending on how big or small you want them to me this kind of uh solves a lot of the issues around uh between these two things both the text font scaling and these like basic interface tweaks uh it helps alleviate a little bit of the claustrophobia without having to go full display scaling now on my particular display because it's only 1080p I only get the difference between 100 and 200% scaling and I don't get any other options there let me know if you I'm I'm fairly confident that if you have a higher pixel count display you get more options here in terms of fractional scaling but I also could be wrong with that so if you've got a high resolution display in the comments let me know the next one I wanted to talk about very quickly was transparency because some of you might notice and some of you did notice that the task bar by default here is transparent this leads me to the extensions part of the video where cinnamon does have in their catalog uh quite a few little helpful extensions uh that you can download from within the system settings you can see I've got a few enabled here by default there's transparent puddles it is worth mentioning that there's another transparent um uh panel mode here that's uh characterized as reloaded and uh and I I think the only difference is that you can um you can customize the color of the transparency I think whereas transparent panels just does what it says on the tin when you maximize a window it no longer makes it transparent so you don't get a weird unpredictable uh color of your taskbar the other one that I like to add is uh G tile which basically gives your uh it basically gives you options to use a more sophisticated tiling window manager with keyboard shortcuts like you see on the screen here um and this works in conjunction with or not at the expense of your usual uh drag to the corners of the window for Quadrant tiling and full screen tiling that cinnamon has had for some time uh so for those when you for those times where you're really trying to get organized and have Windows automatically snap to a particular grid layout it is uh very very helpful to be able to use uh this uh tiling Window Manager to create whatever kind of layout you want think of it like Windows uh Windows 11's tiling layouts but kind of on steroids and many people in the Linux World appreciate and love the tiling window managers that are Standalone and the ones that are built into things like Po's Cosmic desktop uh so it's just a fantastic regularly updated extension that ranks very highly in the cinnamon desktop extensions list uh finally the cinnamon Dynamic wallpaper is one that was new to me uh with cinnamon uh or with Linux Mint 21.1 I think um this is one that I I've only recently become aware of but it is a fantastic little tool that helps you create those kind of nice superficial but kind of nice uh Dynamic wallpapers that change throughout the day not only does it help you uh configure your own set of images it also understands the dynamic images that are standard for the Apple Macos wallpapers so if you really like what Apple does with their um with their Dynamic wallpapers you can actually go and get those same files and this extension will understand those files and uh and let you use it um but also they also come with a uh just a set of uh images um that are all kind of this uh sort of Fairly flat 2D um artwork kind of style uh of different Landscapes that you can uh use and configure for whatever time of the day that it might be some of you might recognize these from other um os's I think I'm definitely seeing some of these from uh from Mac OS and some of these other ones uh from just around the internet but the fact that it comes bundled with a few um ones to try it out is really nice and you can obviously uh configure what time a day things switch and all of that good stuff so that brings me to Nala Nala is a basically an updated uh or an upgraded version of Apt that you can install and it helps you install stuff from the command line with more feat back with a more logical layout and also just a prettier and cleaner way of installing stuff from the command line so a simple pseudo app to install Nala is all you need to do to be able to get this piece of goodness and then you use it essentially like you would with apt so if there's a particular package that you're looking to install let's say I wanted to install I don't know inkscape so I would go pseudo Nala install inkscape give it your root password and what you're going to notice here is instead of having black and white endless feed and scroll of texts you can see we get a colorcoded nicely laid out uh layout of all of the packages that are going to change the ones that are going to be removed or recommended to be removed you hit yes for continuing and instead of an endless Scroll of text you get a lovely clean progress bar and uh a little readout of everything that's going on it just looks so much better and uh the cherry on top is that it is it uses accelerated downloads or multi-threaded downloads so that your package downloads are typically faster with Nala now what I should I should give a disclaimer here that it is possible in theory that you might have some discrepancies in uh conflict package conflict resolution with Nala because it's not as robust as apt in theory but in practice and I've been using this for some time now and I've seen other people recommend it and talk about it I haven't come across that myself I have had situations where it sometimes gets a little bold with uh the packages that it recommends to be removed but I don't know if that's naras issue or if that's an apt issue overall most of the time nine times out of 10 if I'm installing something from the repositories I'll do it through Nala and if I'm wanting to install software that's on flathub I will do it through the software manager because it seems to be the quickest way and prettiest way of getting things done finally the last little recommendation I want to give you is in regards to warat warat is a really great Wireless transfer uh tool that can help you send files wirelessly around your local Wi-Fi connection very similar to how airdrop works on the Mac and between phones and stuff however the kicker is is that warat for all of its beauty and for all of its usefulness coming default on Linux Mint uh it doesn't work particularly well with anything iOS related so that means in order to be able to wirelessly transfer files you're going to need to get something else so this is where my other little recommendation for today's video comes in and that's local send local send is a uh fantastic little tool that is U multiplatform you can literally get it on every platform there is including uh Mac Linux Windows Android and iOS and it works flawlessly on all of these platforms I believe it's either written in flutter or something very close to it because it has really nice smooth mobile first kind of animations but it's been really solid like I've used a lot of ad hoc uh peer-to-peer Wi-Fi Wireless Exchange um file transfer tools over the years this one Takes the Cake and I don't know how long it's been around for but my guess is not too long but man is it well loved by those who have found it uh so can't recommend local sending up get it on all the devices that you own and you will very quickly have the same level of user experience that people do in the Apple world and I really feel like this helps round out the the lack of ecosystem or at least one simple problem of getting files between devices uh quickly and easily so this is the default interface for local send and uh basically there's either a receiving mode or a sending mode if you want to resent uh if you want to send something you can choose a file folder text or just copy paste stuff and it'll pick up whatever other devices on your network so for example I'll open up uh local send here on my iPhone and you can see here that it brings up uh and it automatically code names them all and you can set it up to have access pins and all that kind of thing but by default it seems uh fairly simple and straightforward you upload a file hand them back and forth and uh and the Wireless transfer speeds seem really good and I think that all about do us Fedora 39 has just come out so let me know if you want me to dig into that in a coming video I don't really have too much to say about it at the moment other than it's a gnome release and it is what it is but let me know is there something I should be checking out with Fedora 39 thanks so much for watching I'll see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 112,140

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews

Id: E_SiHxA3QY0

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023